Site Search

Categories

Anonymous Africa

2016 was a big year for information security in South Africa. Hacktivists Anonymous took an interest in the country after launching #OpAfrica, aiming to draw attention to child labour and Internet censorship on the continent. It was also a year with security stories which would make several good movies, complete with the ruler of a drug empire who was also a hacker.

Below are South Africa’s biggest security stories of 2016.

#OpAfrica hacks

Hackers from Anonymous announced Operation Africa at the start of 2016. “The focus of the operation is a disassembly of corporations and governments that enable and perpetuate corruption on the African continent,” it said. Anonymous hacked an old GCIS database[1] and dumped the usernames and passwords it contained online.

South Africans compromised in Brazzers hack

Porn site Brazzers was hacked[13] and the details of almost 800,000 user accounts were leaked in 2016. Of these, 519 contained email addresses from South African domains – with four South African government departments listed.

Standard Bank ATM fraud in Japan

About 100 people used forged Standard Bank credit cards to withdraw ?1.8bn from 1,400 ATMs in Tokyo and other areas in Japan in under three hours. No customers suffered financial losses as a result of the “sophisticated, coordinated fraud incident,” said Standard Bank.

New biometric standard for card payments

The Payments Association of South Africa (Pasa) launched a national biometric standard for card payments in 2016.

Pasa said the standard, developed in partnership with MasterCard and Visa, was the first of its kind.

Hacked South African servers for sale

Access to compromised South African servers was found in the xDedic marketplace[20] and South African IPs were implicated in attacks launched from vDOS[21]– a distributed denial of service platform for hire.

The drug-dealing, briefly-South-African crypto king

After hearing the story of Paul le Roux[22], you would be forgiven for thinking he was a villain from a James Bond movie. Called “probably the most dangerous man in the world”, Le Roux comes complete with a tenuous link to Edward Snowden through TrueCrypt, software he was rumoured to have a hand in.